Changing customs brings project success

Stunted by outsourcing, the UK’s Revenue and Customs service used cultural transformation to reinvent its application infrastructure.

The size and complexity of government organisations has led to mixed results for digital transformation efforts, but the experiences of teams in one UK government project have shown that sometimes the greatest successes come from starting small and empowering staff to keep control of their projects.

Following the lead of the transformation-minded UK Government Digital Service (GDS), UK revenue authority Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) embarked on a major transformation several years ago as it worked to build a scalable new applications architecture that would support its business into the future.

Over the course of three years, the project would expand from what Alun Coppack, partner with HMRC implementation partner Equal Experts called “humble beginnings — just a few people in a room” to span 50 software delivery teams across multiple locations across the UK.

Those teams, which each manage a few of the 250 componentised ‘microservices’ that make up HMRC’s new application infrastructure, collectively number more than 8000 people who manage systems handling nearly 2 billion transactional page views annually.

Getting to that point, however, took time and effort — largely because the historical legacy of government outsourcing had destroyed any hope of creating flexible, innovation-minded teams.

“With outsourcing, the government completely removed any innovation and introduced the inability to make change,” Equal Experts partner Duncan Crawford told attendees at this year’s Agile Australia conference.

“There was this really restricted environment where there was no product ownership, step change was not possible and we wouldn’t have been able to deliver early and show value.”

Trying to brute-force this culture was a road to nowhere, so the change-minded team decided to start small — identifying “something small that has high impact”, as Crawford put it, “and creating a small team filled with subject matter experts… Isolate that small team, create a clear deliverable, and ask the team to work within core principles” that emphasise agile, iterative functioning over monolithic habits.

Government was not completely without its inspiration, however: to their surprise, the team found strong and valuable guidance in the GDS’s Digital Service Standard — a set of 18 guidelines for transformational government service delivery (subsequently appropriated by Australia’s Digital Transformation Office) that Coppack said aligned better with the principles of agile development than he ever would have expected.

“If you’d heard that the government had defined 18 rules for good software delivery you might be a bit sceptical,” said Coppack.

“But it advises things like ‘understand users’ needs’, ‘build a service that can be iterative’, ‘create a service that’s simple and intuitive enough that users succeed the first time through’, and ‘test the service from beginning to end with the person that commissioned it’,” he added.

“By the time I got to the end I thought that if I worked for an organisation that embodied these principles, this would be a great thing.”

The iterative development of HMRC’s new digital platform progressively expanded as teams, empowered to think differently for the first time in a long time, began mapping out ideas about service delivery and building the microservices to deliver them. Those microservices interact online, working together to create the living, breathing whole that is continuously revisited, expanded and improved.

The key to maintaining flexibility with a growing team is to ensure that the architecture retains its unitary design, with microservices given simple names that describe the one — and only one — behaviour of the microservice performs.

“Naming is really important in software services,” Coppack explained. “If you can’t give that one name to a service, it’s not a microservice. If you’re making it do two, three or four behaviours, you end up with multiple teams working on that thing.

“But we did one set of services, and as we grew the services and features it was easy to apply another team to own those things,” he said. “The concept mapped beautifully for the relationship, and ownership, and growth of the organisation.”

The success of the HMRC’s massive technological and cultural shift reflects the potential benefits that can be had when transformation is embraced fully and given leave to grow progressively within even the most regressive environment.

Small, early wins speak volumes for the success of the project and that success quickly begets more success, which in turn provides even more impetus for cultural change.

Getting that change in motion can be harder than even the staunchest advocates of transformation realise early on — and despite years of progress, there is still much work to be done before organisations are ready to enjoy the benefits of transformation.

A recent Unisys survey of 175 IT and business executives highlighted the challenges organisations still face around digital transformation. While 72% of the surveyed senior executives said they see a digital business model as critical for success, just 24% of respondents believe they are making any progress in developing scalable IT for their digital business.

Worse still, only 15% believe their organisations are actually nimble enough to operate as a full digital business.

As the Equal Experts and HMRC teams found, pushing reality closer to expectations is a long and complex process. And in the end, Coppack said, success comes from designing an effective team structure and maintaining it throughout the transformation.

“Teams that are able to work in the way that suits them best, and with the least amount of dependencies, are in our experience the ones that are highest performing,” he explained.

“Transferring ownership for the product to some external governance body just doesn’t work; the teams themselves, and the people working in the teams, are the ones best placed to manage these things.

“By promoting and championing autonomy within your organisation and designing for loose coupling, you can enable teams to take ownership of their products. The greatest indicator of our success is that we now have other government departments using our platform to deliver their services.”

Image courtesy Images Money under CC BY 2.0